The clinic managed to recoup its investment in only three years

Hillcrest Family Health Clinics in Central Texas is currently taking advantage of the features and capabilities that an intelligent system has to offer.

With over half a million transactions processed every day for the clinic’s 200,000 patients across several facilities and towns, the network needed a boost, and Michael Allison, IT administrator, decided to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Embedded platform.

“In a clinical setting with hundreds of PCs and devices, hundreds of thousands of patient records, and dozens of providers, efficiently managing this much data is critical,” Allison says.

Allison decided to turn the clinic’s technology into a true intelligent system, to connect locations and devices in the cloud in an attempt to improve the ease and efficiency of care.

“After evaluating several solutions, he chose to build an intelligent system with Microsoft. Centralized data stores were consolidated on two machines running Windows Server Hyper-V, and clinics were outfitted with Windows Embedded Standard-based thin clients,” Microsoft explains.

Hillcrest experienced a great increase in efficiency following the adoption of the new system. Mandatory downtime for system upgrades were eliminated, data traffic on the clinic network’s bandwidth was significantly reduced, while savings per year went up to 35 percent.

At the moment, the clinic can manage hundreds of peripheral devices used across a wide geographic area through the cloud, while relying on the new system to manage data such as patient records, prescriptions, scheduling, billing, inventory and more.

“I can sit at my desk and run our whole system from my office without having to physically go to any one of our nine locations and do anything to the computers there,” Allison says. “Everything worked as soon as we put it in; it all just worked seamlessly.”

“We’ve been able to refocus available funds onto new services for our patients,” Allison continues. “Our intelligent system strategy is an important part of our mission to provide the right care to the right patient, securely, consistently and efficiently.”

Through the new system, physicians and caregivers can remotely access data within a security-enhanced framework. In three years, Hillcrest was able to recoup its investment, and could also add 1,500 more patients per year.